Berbati's Live-Music Venue Ted's Closing at Year's End

This time it's serious.

For the second time in precisely two years, Berbati's venerable, once-essential live-music music venue—formerly Berbati's Pan, lately Ted's in honor of the late Ted Papaioannou—will be shutting down operations. After December 31, 2012, Ted's will be no more.

"There hasn't been much going on over there for a while," co-owner Nick Papaioannou told WW over a beer at Berbati's bar, which will remain very much open. "The time comes for everything to end. And maybe this is the time for this to end."

Papaioannou says that in contrast to the last time that the venue was shut down, Berbati's has no plans to re-open the Ted's space as a live venue in the future.

Over the past two years, Ted's strayed from the mid-level indie-rock booking that was Berbati's Pan's bread and butter through most of its tenure in the 1990s and 2000s, hosting a number of dance and hip hop DJ nights. The area between the bar and venue was recently put to use as a poker hall, a business decision Papaioannou described as "kind of a big mistake."

But in its heyday, Berbati's Pan hosted live bands almost nightly, and was central to the downtown music scene over nearly two decades. We'll have more on the club's pending closure in the future, but for now we'll direct you to an homage by former WW music editor Casey Jarman, written when the venue shut down the first time, on December 31, 2010.

One figure central to the venue's history will remain in the space, however: Voodoo Doughnuts' Tres Shannon, who was a booker for Berbati's Pan for a number of years, expanded his doughnut shop into the former atrium of Berbati's Pan in 2011.